SUSE Expands Its Linux Offerings on Microsoft Azure

SUSE and Microsoft are expanding their decade-old partnership to the cloud. Today the two companies announced that SUSE has joined the Microsoft Enterprise Cloud Alliance and the Microsoft Test Drive program.

The Test Drive program will enable Microsoft Azure customers to try out SUSE's High Performance Computing (HPC) edition of its Linux server.

"SUSE's business in Microsoft Azure has been growing steadily as our customers look to run enterprise-supported Linux workloads in the cloud," Frank Rego, SUSE business development manager, told ServerWatch. "The Enterprise Cloud Alliance will help SUSE increase awareness of our solutions to customers."

Rego added that the alliance is specific to the cloud and complements the existing partnership with Microsoft. The partnership that Microsoft has with SUSE first began back in 2006, when SUSE was still part of Novell, and has been renewed and expanded over the years since then.

The initial Microsoft-Novell deal included a patent promise provision that provided intellectual property protection. Back in 2006, Microsoft's official position was that open source and Linux in particular infringed on Microsoft's intellectual property. In 2006, SUSE was the only Linux partnership that Microsoft had, a situation that has changed in 2016. Microsoft today has multiple Linux partnerships, including Red Hat and Canonical's Ubuntu Linux.

The SUSE for HPC on Azure offering is a somewhat unique flavor of Linux that is available in Microsoft's cloud.

"In this image, we include the Intel MPI (Message Passing Interface) packages, and the RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) driver is automatically installed to take advantage of the Infiniband back end," Rego said.

In addition to the HPC edition, SUSE also has enabled its tooling to help build and manage Linux servers in the cloud. Rego said that SUSE Studio can build SUSE Linux Enterprise Server images that can be deployed directly to Azure from SUSE Studio.

"SUSE Studio can build the image in the format required by Azure, which can then be deployed directly to Azure in one click," Rego explained. "SUSE Manager can be run in Azure, through SUSE Bring Your Own Subscription, or run on premises to manage workloads deployed in Azure.

Rego added that SUSE has partnered with providers around the world to make SUSE solutions available to customers in the cloud.

"In terms of HPC, we are not announcing the availability of HPC on any other clouds today," Rego said.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at ServerWatch and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist